Our View: MBTA Pension Fund has been secret long enough

We pay a lot of taxes in the Bay State. The governor signed another $500 million into existence barely a week ago to help maintain our roads and bridges.

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southcoasttoday.com

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Posted Aug. 9, 2013 at 12:01 AM

Posted Aug. 9, 2013 at 12:01 AM

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We pay a lot of taxes in the Bay State. The governor signed another $500 million into existence barely a week ago to help maintain our roads and bridges.

Taxpayers deserve and should demand to know how all our tax dollars are spent, and government has the indisputable duty to see that we do. But it's much easier said than done.

The $1.39 billion MBTA Retirement Fund, which pays monthly retirement checks to retired transit workers, was funded by taxpayer dollars in the amount of $55 million in 2012. That's 45 percent more than it was in 2007.

The work of the MBTA Retirement Fund, the private firm that oversees Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority pensions, is now subject to the state's laws about open public records, just like any private contractor on a public works project.

The panel's board, however, is dragging its feet in replying to a request from the Boston Herald for information about how the pension fund distributes its money. According to the paper's Aug. 2 edition, its attorney responded to the Herald's request with a letter stating he is checking "the constitutional, statutory and common law issues they raise, in order to assist the Board in determining its obligations."

The change in the law enables the public to see whether everything is above board, to give clarity about what we're buying and how we're buying it, as Jim Stergios of the Boston-based think tank Pioneer Institute put it in an interview Thursday, and to see just how quickly the burden balloons.

It also exposes to the light a part of the state pension system that should be of paramount importance to Bay Staters.

The governor's elegant, forward-thinking tax proposal of this winter would have raised nearly four times the revenue the Legislature has provided with its plan, but homes earning less than $60,000 a year would have seen taxes go down. It would have funded South Coast Rail and statewide early childhood education.

The $500 million package we got in its place raises taxes in every household that buys gasoline, cigarettes or computer software, pays only lip service to rail and does little more than level-fund early ed.

SouthCoast sucked it up on this budget, while the T got another $115 million just to balance its books.

State workers, including those of the MBTA, don't pay into Social Security Insurance, and so they receive pensions instead. Pension systems, however, continue to drive more municipal decisions and take bigger bites out of public budgets, starving the projects that are so vital to public infrastructure, education and safety: literally our present and our future.

Pension reform has been welcomed, but slow to come. The MBTA Retirement Fund's compliance with the law shouldn't be that hard to come by.